Since the pogroms of October 7, we have witnessed, stunned and disgusted, the pro-Hamas demonstrations in American universities which minimized, even denied the reality of the massacre of Israeli civilians. And suddenly an image emerged that sums up the reality of America’s elite universities: in December 2023, a plane dragged a Palestinian flag and a banner reading over the campus of the most famous American university:Harvard hate Jews“. Which immediately reminded me that from 1922 to the 1960s Jewish students were subject to a strict numerus clausus system in elite American universities at the initiative of… Harvard. Today, we advise Jewish students to remain cloistered in their rooms, to avoid going out at night, to protect themselves because they are Jewish, because the university, the police, the State are no longer capable of ensuring their security.
While Nemat Shafik, president of Columbia, a New York campus with 36,000 students, including 5,000 Jewish students, was being interviewed by the House of Representatives Committee on Education in the American Congress, Columbia students were setting up tents on the university lawns to create “a solidarity camp with Gaza”. During her hearing, the president, of Egyptian origin, responded to the now ritual question “Does the call for the genocide of the Jews violate the internal regulations of the university?” with a frank “yes, he rapes him”. She did not commit the indignity of the university presidents of Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of Pennsylvania by responding that it “depends on the context.”
She also assured that Mohamed Abdou, a professor at Columbia who had publicly given his vocal and enthusiastic support to Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad “will never work at Columbia again.” Upon his return from Washington, Nemat Shafik sent an ultimatum to the students to evacuate the campus, which they refused to do. She then called the police, who carried out the evacuation; 108 students were arrested. The students didn’t like it at all, comparing the police to members of the Ku Klux Klan and the Israeli army, which they nicknamed IOF – Israel Occupation Force. On Saturday, April 20, we could hear students on campus chanting “Long live Hamas!” And “burn Tel Aviv to the ground“, or “7th October everyday” And “Hamas will bring you hell“. A student’s Israeli flag was burned at the campus entrance, and a young woman pointed with a sign at Jewish students: they are “Al-Qassam’s next targets.”
Elijah Muhammad and George Lincoln Rockwell won
Obviously, we have gone a step further from what was already a frank manifestation of anti-Semitism and which now doubles as frank support for an Islamist terrorist group. For these uneducated kids from the kingdom of Wokistan, the world is separated into two categories: the dominant and the dominated. Hamas being Islam and Islam being dominated, the woke is for Hamas and therefore against the Jew. Because Wokistan is against colonization – the worst crime after slavery – and in its eyes Israel represents the last colony. All against the Jews. And, again, it reminded me of another chilling image. It was 1961, at a convention of the Nation of Islam founded Elijah Muhammad, admiringly nicknamed the Black people’s Hitler by George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party in 1959, and who was in the front row, in Nazi garb with his Nazi buddies, applauding his hero Elijah Muhammad, with whom he shared the desire for strict segregation between races and virulent anti-Semitism.
What never ceases to move me is the sad realization that it was Elijah Muhammad and George Lincoln Rockwell who won. Not the Jewish Americans and African Americans who marched together in the 1960s for civil rights. What makes me sick is that it only takes a little thing for the sacred union of racists and separatists to suddenly be renewed in the name of anti-Semitism. And that’s downright disgusting.
Abnousse Shalmani, committed against the obsession with identity, is a writer and journalist
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